Few radio station stories start with “So we put the station on the air on Christmas Eve.” But 104.1 KMOX in St. Louis isn’t your typical radio station.
The heritage news/talk brand is set to celebrate its 100th anniversary next week, and longtime Brand Manager Steve Moore joked he’d been planning the on-air specials surrounding the event since he joined the station in 1999.
“I remember the 75th anniversary, because I was only here for a year, and at that time, I wasn’t nearly involved in the process of building it, and I remember the things that we were doing at that time,” said Moore. “So over the course of the past year, as this has gotten closer to me, I think that this is a significant not only for KMOX, I think it’s significant for the city of St Louis, because KMOX is so tied into the fabric of our of our community.
“And I think it’s significant for our industry that we celebrate these big brands,” Moore added. “We’ve been thinking about it for a year, and we’ve had big ideas, and we’ve had and some ideas that were that we didn’t work, we didn’t pull off, and other ideas that have worked out great. And over the course of the past four or five months, it ramped up into what we wanted to do.”
A St. Louis native, Moore said he wonders what went through the minds of the station’s founders on Christmas Eve 1925 that made putting the station on the air their top priority.
“I always am like, well, what were those guys doing that day that they were like, ‘Let’s put it on today. I gotta be at my mom’s for dinner at around three, so we better do it in the morning,'” he said with a laugh. “What was the conversation that day that they decided to put the radio station on?”
When asked if the 100th anniversary falling on a holiday — or at least the eve of a holiday — was an inconvenience, the KMOX Brand Manager said it wasn’t.
“I think it was inconvenient only in the sense that the audience levels would have been down, and we wanted to be able to try to do it when we would have the most amount of listeners that we could expose it to,” he said.
In total, the 100th anniversary special is over 10 hours long. Which means there are plenty of opportunities to reuse the content, portion the content out into its own specials, or use it for “best of” programming if needed.
Dozens of people — whether they be current or former hosts, reporters, anchors, producers, board ops, or executives — contributed to the 100th anniversary celebration. The celebration began on November 20th, a ceremonial date marking 11/20 on the calendar, mimicking the longstanding 1120 AM band that the station was primarily heard on until receiving a full-market FM simulcast on 104.1 FM earlier this year.
Now that the 10 hours of on-air programming has been produced, Steve Moore said it’s now about fine-tuning the content.
“We want the show — when people listen to it — we want the very natural interactions. We want the excitement, and we want the studio door to be open and there to be a buzz about it,” said Moore. “So I want that to play through the show. The show — when we built it, when we did the outline for it — was, by design, hour by hour. And we felt like we were checking boxes to make sure that we were respectful for the first 50 years … so we checked a lot of boxes by design. It flows very naturally. The first hour is kind of a historical perspective of the radio station and how when they launched the radio station, it’s style positions, who the players were that owned the radio station, and what the programming was.
“And then in the second hour, we introduced Bob Hyland with his daughter Molly Hyland, and we talked about his impact in the community, launching agri-service programming, and then it evolved into what became our news department and news programming. That carried on for several hours, until we introduced sports programming. At the back half of the day, we focus on sports,” Moore added. “Our sports history is very, very rich. We know we’re not an all-sports station, but when your roster of Hall of Famers includes Jack Buck, Bob Costas, and Dan Dierdorf, you’ve got some names on your roster.”
Moore added that he believes, even 100 years after its original sign-on date, that 104.1 KMOX is accomplishing the mission that was started on Christmas Eve 1925.
“Right or wrong, I think that we have done and tried to be true to what the mission of the radio station has been in recent years, and have actually gone back towards that,” said Moore. “There was a time when — and I’m not taking anything away from the 25 years Rush Limbaugh was on the radio station — politics became such a huge part of it, and it moved the radio station either right, too far right, or too far left, or whatever, however you want to look at the radio station when politics drove it.
“But I really tried to keep the radio station true to its core. It’s community-focused. It has a strong news background. It has integrated sports throughout its programming,” continued Moore. “The talent are not typical of what you might hear on a lot of radio stations around the country. We’re not looking for their hot takes on their political ideas. We’re looking for smart, interesting people who are community-minded and focused, and who are able to talk about a wide range of things. I think that we’ve done a pretty good job of trying to keep the radio station St Louis-centric, and try our best to stay out of the politics.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
